Introduction

Click here for a description of our 2006 teacher workshop

Why do we need another website about mushrooms and other Fungi? At TFTOL, we aim to fill some previously neglected niches in teaching about Fungi.

First, we intend to provide more accessible resources for in-depth study of the Fungi. To accomplish this goal, we are providing sample lesson plans to go along with each page of content. Our lessons stress inquiry-based learning and performance assessment.

Additionally, we plan to address the difficulty of getting real, recent science into the hands of students. The adapted, peer-reviewed literature that will be available in our Featured Science pages is aimed at fostering authentic scientific literacy and promoting inquiry as the basis of learning.

We also intend to keep the content highly organized and methodical in order to make it more adaptable to your curriculum. In teaching fungi, the effective teacher can introduce or reinforce concepts in evolution, ecology, genetics and molecular biology in authentic situations, preserving limited time and resources.

Each lesson is written with the High School Level in mind, but with suggestions for adaptations to primary school.

In the event that this site does not meet all your fungal education needs, we include extensive links to other resources on the internet that may be more tailored to your situation.

This website is being developed in the Hibbett laboratory of Clark University. Members of our lab study fungal evolutionary biology and ecology, and make heavy use of molecular techniques. The introductory sections of this website provide a general overview of mycology, while the later sections reflect our specific interests in fungal diversity, ecology, and evolution. The site pays particular attention to recent insights into fungal ecology and evolutionary biology that have been made using molecular characters. References to important and accessible recent primary literature are provided, as is a glossary of mycological terms.

Information about current research in our lab can be found on our lab web site: http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/dhibbett/.

Development of this site is being supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation for research in fungal evolutionary biology (NSF award number DEB-0228657).